OAKLAND, Calif. – A panel of linguists has deemed "red state, blue state, purple state" the phrase that most colored the nation's lexicon in 2004.

Attendees at the annual convention of the Linguistic Society of America on Friday chose the word or phrase that dominated national discourse over the course of the last year.

"It was the best candidate for word of the year," said Dennis Preston, a professor of linguistics at Michigan State University. "It engaged the American public for the entire year. Nothing showed the bloodthirsty population-engaging election as this."

Other nominees for word of the year were:
flip-flopper, a politician who changes political stances;

meet-up, a local special interest meeting organized though a national Web site;

mash-up, a blend of two songs or albums into a single cohesive musical work; and

wardrobe malfunction, an unanticipated exposure of bodily parts. The term was coined when viewers saw singer Janet Jackson's breast during the Super Bowl halftime show.

This was the 15th year of the contest, sponsored by the American Dialect Society.

Preston made a pitch for the term "lawn mullet," which describes a lawn that is neatly mowed in the front but unmowed in the back, as a candidate for the Most Creative category.

"Hillbilly armor," describing U.S. troops scavenging for material to protect their vehicles, and

nerdvana, a term for collaborative geekiness, also were nominated in that category, but lost to

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Depends on whether Grammarian is masculine or feminine (or neuter).

As I recall, in Latin (which Grammarian is not) a noun of profession always takes the gender of the occupant. Thus, dominator/dominatrix; aviator/aviatrix. Not that there were a lot of aviatrices in ancient Rome.

EVERYBODY seems to be on the rap world's case these days. And for what? Trivial things like lyrics that glorify violence, misogyny and racism? Or the propensity of some rappers to aerate one another with hot lead?

The people who should really be hip-hopping mad are grammarians.

Yet for the most part they stand on the sidelines, raising no audible objections to Lil' Kim's wayward apostrophe or 50 Cent's hostility to plurals or the spelling horrors committed by the likes of Supreem Da Regulata, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg and Capone-N-Noreaga. Where, you have to ask yourself, is the outrage?

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
A Def Ear to the Rules of Grammar
By CLYDE HABERMAN

Money quotation:

It seems that Mr. Cent, who earns a lot more than four bit for his albums, does not get along with Mr. Game. You know how temperamental artists can be. That is especially true when they walk around with bullet wounds from old shoot-'em-ups. Fortunately for Mr. Cent, wounded nine times but going strong, some in the rap world don't shoot any better than they spell.

In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported (Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???) an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense.